Kerry did as she was told and the till cut the price of one meal in half. Then she turned around and searched the racks desperately.
‘Where are the beans?’ Kerry shouted.
Randall stood up and shrugged. ‘Ready in five minutes.’
According to the Deluxe Chicken training manual, you were never supposed to deter customers from buying by saying how long an order would take. You were only supposed to say ‘ready in a moment’, but Kerry didn’t feel comfortable lying.
‘Five minutes,’ she said.
The customer sucked air between her teeth. ‘Just gimme two bloody Fantas then.’
Kerry assembled the order for the impatient customer, by which time another was waiting. Randall was working the prep station cooking pieces of chicken and making up the sandwiches, but Kerry was annoyed that she was doing all the serving while James and Gemma mucked around at the back.
Luckily for her, Gabriel stepped out of his office as two more customers joined the queue.
‘Let’s hustle, people,’ Gabriel shouted, then he glowered at Gemma. ‘Why do we have a queue of customers and only one register open? Randall, move your arse. Kerry, good work, keep it moving. James …’
The scrawny manager had taken a dislike to James back-chatting him when he’d first arrived.
‘James, I seem to be getting a lot of negative vibes from you,’ Gabriel said. ‘I don’t think you’ve got the correct attitude for serving customers, so I want you to get a bucket of hot water and a broom, then you can go out into the alleyway, wash up the puke from the weekend and sweep up all that broken glass.’
James was furious at being picked on and considered telling the manager where to stick his job, but he knew he’d be in deep shit with Meryl if he got fired from work experience after less than three hours, so he filled a bucket with disinfectant and hot water and sauntered outside while moaning to himself about the crummy job he’d landed.
Back in the restaurant the queue died down once Gemma started serving, so Gabriel invited Kerry across to the second prep station. This was only used on Friday and Saturday evenings when the restaurant was packed out with bowlers and cinema-goers.
‘You seem like a smart girl,’ Gabriel said. ‘Would you like me to show you a few things?’
Kerry smiled and nodded keenly. James shot her a dark look as he came back inside carrying a pail filled with broken glass.
‘Ah, James,’ Gabriel said smugly. ‘When you’re done with that, you can pick up the litter and wipe down the tables inside the restaurant.’
Kerry couldn’t resist poking out her tongue at James as he went back out into the alleyway.
‘This is a standard cooking station used in Deluxe Chicken restaurants all over the world,’ Gabriel explained, loving the sound of his own voice as he stood a little too close to Kerry for comfort. ‘Three deep fat fryers, for chicken burgers, chicken pieces or fries. A salad and relish station where we make up our sandwiches and baguettes, and over your head two microwaves, to ensure that all sandwiches are delivered at an acceptable temperature.
‘Your basic ingredient is frozen chicken. All the boxes come from the walk-in freezer and on each one you’ll see there’s a coloured square. Simply match the colours on the box to the colours on the fryer dial and the computer automatically sets the right cooking time.’
Kerry looked at the solid layers of milky fat in the fryers. ‘How long does it take for the fat to heat up?’
‘About fifteen minutes from cold. While the oil heats up, the operator is expected to fill the containers with salad and condiments from the fridge and make sure that the preparation surfaces and the inside of the microwaves are wiped down with anti-bacterial gel.’
Gabriel went on in this less than riveting fashion for another ten minutes, but being keen to make a good impression Kerry nodded, smiled at her boss’s feeble jokes and asked lots of questions. Gabriel had an annoying habit of standing too close and Kerry found this creepy, but she ignored it right up until the moment when he planted a hand on her bum.
‘Get that off,’ Kerry snarled. ‘Now.’
Gabriel smiled. ‘Just being friendly, honey,’ he said, as he gave her cheek a gentle squeeze.
Kerry stepped back and put her hand up behind her boss’s head. She bopped his forehead against the front of a microwave oven with such force that it broke off the bracket holding it to the wall.
‘Hey,’ Gabriel shouted, wagging a finger in Kerry’s face. ‘I know Karate.’
‘Really?’ Kerry said indignantly. ‘So do I.’
James heard the commotion and came running inside to find Randall and Gemma watching in amazement.
‘You lay one more finger on my arse, you skinny perv,’ Kerry hissed, ‘or anyone else’s for that matter and it’ll be more than pieces of dead chickens sizzling in your deep fat fryers.’
Kerry was tempted to break Gabriel’s pointing finger, but she didn’t want to do any permanent damage so she shoved him backwards into the refrigerator.
‘You got Karate?’ Kerry growled, goading Gabriel on as she moved into a fighting stance. ‘Come on then, skinny. Show us your moves.’
Gemma jumped up in the air and clapped her hands noisily. ‘You tell him, sister,’ she shouted. ‘I already warned him I’d get my Danny in here to give him a slap if his busy hands came near me again.’
Gabriel was in a daze from his encounter with the microwave and didn’t fancy his chances. ‘Get back to work,’ he steamed, as his bandy arms flailed in the air. ‘All of you.’
Then he dashed into his little office and slammed the door.
Gemma ran over to Kerry. ‘Are you OK?’ she asked sympathetically.
‘I’d bet I feel better than his head,’ Kerry said, as she broke into a sly grin.
‘All right, sistaah,’ Gemma grinned, as she gave Kerry a high five. ‘I thought you were a square, but you showed him.’
‘I hate people like that,’ Kerry said as James stepped up to the microwave and admired the crack Gabriel’s head had made in the clear plastic door. ‘First day on the job when you’re vulnerable … I mean, I know how to defend myself, but there’s a lot of people out there who don’t.’
21. SCHOOL
The Emergency Relocation Unit is a sub-branch of the intelligence service that makes short-notice housing arrangements for everyone from CHERUB agents to protected witnesses. Within two days of Mac telling them that he’d need an apartment close to Hassam Bin Hassam’s Hampstead home, the local estate agencies had been scoured and the team had discreetly signed a lease on a three-bedroom apartment in a luxury block.
Mac dealt directly with Jake and Lauren’s enrolment in school. Over the years, CHERUB had become adept at manipulating school staff and computer systems to ensure that young agents ended up sitting in the same classroom as their targets.
Three hours after briefing on the mission, Mac was driving Lauren down the motorway with Jake in the back and their luggage stacked in the boot. He drove fast because he had to buy ties and badges for Lauren and Jake from the school uniform shop and then meet with their new deputy head at 5 p.m.
*
Lauren had slept in loads of places since she’d joined CHERUB, but she always found it hard to sleep on her first night in a new bed. No amount of experience seemed to quell the butterflies that came at the start of each mission. If anything, after being shot at, kidnapped, blasted with pepper spray and nearly getting blown up, her nerves had worsened.
Mac cooked a full English breakfast, but Lauren only managed to rearrange the food with her fork a few times before downing a couple of mouthfuls of egg and pushing away the plate.
‘My cooking not up to scratch?’ Mac asked, as he scraped the plate and loaded it into the dishwasher.
‘New mission nerves,’ Lauren explained.
Mac nodded and glanced at his watch. ‘Pretty standard, I think.’
‘I’m always fine once the mission starts and you know what you’re getting into,’ Lauren said. ‘It’s f
ear of the unknown, I guess.’
‘How about you, Jake?’ Mac asked. ‘You holding up OK?’
Jake sat at the kitchen table wolfing down his food, dressed only in the football shorts and grubby white socks he’d worn the day before. He was small for his eleven years, with spiky black hair, big brown eyes and a boyishly cute face.
‘I never get nerves,’ Jake said, his cheeks bulging with bacon and toast. ‘I’ve been trained. I know what I’m doing – more or less.’
Lauren gritted her teeth. Jake was so full of himself it made her want to scream.
‘You should take it more seriously, Jake,’ she warned. ‘If training goes wrong, you might break a few bones or have to repeat the exercise. If you mess up on a mission you, me and possibly lots of other people could end up dead.’
‘Yeah, yeah,’ Jake said dismissively. ‘I’ve been hearing the same lecture since I was five years old. I’m not stupid, you know? I just can’t see the point in worrying about stuff you can’t control.’ Then he looked over at Mac. ‘Here, Doc, your scrambled eggs are way better than the ones on campus. You got any more going spare?’
Lauren groaned to herself as she headed down the hallway to put on her school uniform. It would be a miracle if she got through the mission without giving in to the urge to crack Jake around the back of the head.
*
Fahim couldn’t get into Burleigh Arts and Media where his friend Louis went because the school had a waiting list. Instead, he had to get a bus to the opposite end of the borough and attend Camden Central. It was the kind of inner-city school that sends shivers down the backs of posh parents.
Fahim hated it but didn’t dare complain. He suspected his father still wanted to send him off to be educated in Abu Dhabi and he didn’t want to provide any excuses.
There were a few kids in Fahim’s class who were OK, but lonely Year Sevens had a rough time in the public spaces. The five-minute walk from the bus stop to his form room was always precarious, and he’d evolved a strategy to minimise the risk. He walked fast, keeping his hands in his blazer and his face aimed straight ahead.
Lauren and Jake had got an early bus to make sure that they spotted Fahim as he left his bus.
‘Looks chunkier than in that picture from his old school,’ Jake noted, as they got off the bench under the bus stop and began following a few paces behind. Their job was easy because the streets were full of kids in black uniforms and blue ties identical to their own.
‘He looks depressed,’ Lauren said. ‘Definitely a fish out of water.’
Fahim was miserable. His father kept inventing reasons why he couldn’t speak to his mum and why she wasn’t coming back, but Fahim was certain it was all lies. Hassam claimed to have spoken to Yasmin on her mobile, but Fahim knew the phone sat in her dressing-room with a flat battery.
At first Hassam said Fahim couldn’t talk to his mum because she was in the countryside and the reception was bad. A week later he claimed that Yasmin had rushed off to Dubai to look after a sick relative. But Fahim knew the code to his father’s safe and he’d snuck inside while he was at a meeting and found all of the family passports inside.
Fahim had no friends at his new school and he shut down all thoughts about his mother because they made him want to cry. In his darkest moments, Fahim had considered killing himself. He’d also thought about killing his father or going to the police, but he was scared of the consequences.
With his mother out of the picture and his father locked up, he’d end up being adopted by his grandfather or his uncle Asif. Either option was a one-way ticket to the kind of ultra-strict upbringing endured by his cousins.
‘What a tub of lard,’ Jake said, grinning at Lauren as Fahim emerged from a newsagent with a Snickers bar and a packet of Skittles.
‘Will you shut up for two seconds?’ Lauren said irritably.
Jake smiled. ‘Sorry, you’re sensitive about that, aren’t you? Bethany told me that your mum was a fatty.’
Lauren gritted her teeth. ‘Jake, if you want to keep your teeth within the vicinity of your head, I’d suggest you don’t talk about my mum like that.’
‘Sorry,’ Jake said, with an obvious lack of sincerity. ‘Don’t overreact, will you?’
By this time they’d reached the school gates. In 2003 Camden Central had opened its doors to both sexes in a desperate bid to attract more pupils, but there were still five boys for every girl. Apart from a few kids who hadn’t got into their first-choice schools, everyone came from sink housing estates nearby. Most faces were black or Asian and Lauren felt uneasy. White girls were a novelty and she could feel boys eyeing her up from all directions.
‘Bend over and show me some of that arse,’ a Year Eleven shouted, as one of his mates blew kisses and another grabbed his crotch and thrust his hips at her.
Lauren felt her cheeks burn and consoled herself with the thought that her combat skills would shatter their oversized egos if they tried anything more than verbals. But she regretted being proud of her legs and picking the shortest skirt she could find from the uniform storeroom on campus.
‘Where are you going?’ Jake said, grabbing Lauren’s blazer as they went up four steps and passed through the school entrance.
She’d been flustered by the boys and hadn’t noticed Fahim taking a right turn. The narrow corridor echoed with raucous lads and a kid screamed as a football blasted against a door centimetres from his head.
‘So close,’ someone shouted. ‘You’re lucky.’
‘Fahim,’ a muscular Asian boy called Alom shouted.
Alom’s mates chanted, ‘Fahim, Fahim, Fahim,’ as Fahim got grabbed by his collar and bundled against the wall. They were all in Year Nine and Fahim had the dejected look of someone who knew he was beat.
‘Skittles,’ Alom said happily, as he extracted the red packet from Fahim’s blazer.
He ripped them open, tipped back his head and poured them decadently into his mouth. About half of the Skittles made it between Alom’s lips; the remainder bounced off his face and clattered down to the tiled floor. Lauren and Jake stopped walking and leaned against the wall like they were waiting for class.
‘Faaaahim!’ another bully shouted, as he jabbed Fahim in the ribs.
‘Here’s the …’ Alom said, as he struggled with a mouth crammed with Skittles. ‘The thing is, Fahim, I seem to have lost my appetite.’
He gobbed the multicoloured clump of chewed-up Skittles into his hand and broke into an evil smile.
‘I tell you what Fahim, why don’t you eat them?’
Fahim looked desperately up and down the corridor, hoping for a teacher to save his butt.
‘I insist,’ Alom grinned. ‘Eat them up or I’ll be seeing you again outside school.’
A tense crowd had gathered around Fahim, including a few of his fellow Year Sevens. Jake reared forward, but Lauren pulled him back.
‘If we save him now he’ll owe us big,’ Jake said.
‘Use your brain,’ Lauren said. ‘There’ll be a riot if you start on that lot. At best we’ll get busted for fighting, at worst one of those nuts will pull a knife out of his jacket and stick it in your back.’
The crowd had started to chant ‘Eat, eat, eat …’ and Fahim looked close to tears.
‘I’ll batter you, Fahim,’ Alom threatened.
The rest of his gang closed in so that Fahim could smell their breath. Everyone quietened down as Fahim took the blob of spit-soaked Skittles from Alom’s beefy hand. He opened his mouth and raised it to his lips.
‘Chomp it down, fat boy.’
As the blob was almost entering his mouth, Fahim thrust his palm forward and screamed out: ‘Bollocks.’
The Year Nine backed up, but Fahim got Alom in the chin with the blob, then mashed it down the front of his shirt, leaving a multicoloured trail. Everyone was stunned by this turn of events and Fahim used his bulk to surge forward. He shoved desperately through the crowd as it let out a collective gasp.
‘Crazy dog,??
? Lauren grinned.
But the Year Nines weren’t so happy. ‘You can run, fat boy,’ Alom shouted, as he stared aghast at his stained shirt. ‘But when I catch you you’re dead.’
Some of the Year-Seven kids started laughing. Lauren glowered at a Year Eleven who said, ‘Hey baby,’ as he brushed past. Then Alom completely lost it. He started lashing out and going psycho.
‘What are you all staring at? Get out of my face, you Year-Seven dicks, or I’ll mash you up.’
Then he turned and saw that some of his own mates were laughing.
‘What’s your problem?’ Alom shouted. ‘Why’d you let him run off?’
The gang all shrugged and mumbled stuff about being taken by surprise.
Lauren looked at her watch, then down at Jake. ‘Go to your classroom and try being nice to Fahim,’ she whispered. ‘My form room is up on the next floor, but I’ve got my phone if you need me.’
‘Cool,’ Jake smiled. ‘Fahim might be a fat arse, but you’ve got to admire his balls.’
22. NICE
James felt depressed as he started his second day at Deluxe Chicken. Kerry had come to work in ripped jeans and the mud-encrusted Nikes she used for running on campus. She deliberately broke the rules by leaving her Deluxe Chicken shirt unbuttoned so that you could see one of Bruce’s T-shirts with the gory poster from a martial arts movie on it.
She was clearly looking for an excuse for a row with the manager, but Gabriel cowered in his tiny office pretending to be busy.
This left Gemma in charge of the staff, which consisted of James, Kerry and a friendly old dude called Harold who worked three days a week to supplement his pension. A couple more would come in at lunchtime to deal with the busy period.
‘Gabriel’s scared of you, Kerry,’ Gemma said happily as the four staff members stood around the kitchen, leaning against the equipment. ‘He knows if you report him for what he did, he might get fired, and even if they couldn’t make it stick he’d never get promoted.’
Kerry had her bum on the service counter – another breach of the rules. ‘He’d better be scared of me,’ she grinned. ‘If he ever touches me again, I won’t bop his head against the microwave, I’ll stick it inside and give him eight hundred watts.’